1st August 2015: I'm 6 pages into Chapter 13, and Chapter 12 is totally done. I also sat down over the weekend and finally got the Comics-Prose Tutorial up on DeviantArt! I eventually plan to reproduce it on this site incase something happens to DA, but that will require me to give this website a makeover (at the end of "Fabled Kingdom" book2?). Also, I'm going to get started on my self-publishing articles too (another 6 months for that, I bet).

Fabled Kingdom Update:Chapter 6, Part 3of8. If you run into a 100-foot wall of brambles, the only logical thing would to be to walk through it and see what's on the other side!

Appearances:

I'll be at Sydney Kinokuniya bookstore on Saturday, 8th August @ 4pm-5:30pm for a panel called "Women in Comics: A Comic-Conversation".

Hi all! The Comics-Prose tutorial is finished! I finally sat down after finishing Chapter 12, and just wrote the whole thing out, complete with pretty graphics.

It’s only available on DA for now, but I’ll eventually reproduce it on this website. I think I’ll get it done when I finally overhaul my website after book2 of “Fabled Kingdom” is done at the very least.

The tutorial covers everything from inception of an idea through to laying out a comic-prose page, so it’s quite extensive. It even covers how to lay out a comic page, because comics-prose is created by reverse-engineering a normal comics page (see the graphic below).

After this tutorial, I’ll be working on a self-publishing tutorial as well, so I expect this will take another 7 months.

Anyway, I’ve now started on Chapter 13, and is about 6 pages into it. It’s a 28-page chapter, so I’m on schedule and all. Also, I’m going to several events next weekend, including a panel on Women in Comics and to SMASH convention in Sydney. Please check above for the details!

I’ve got a new desk, folks. After 20 years of sitting (and drawing) on a small cramped space that was made to contain a tower PC, I now have a… slightly larger desk with actual elbow room and drawers that I don’t use. It hasn’t changed how I do anything, though, except I now have more room to scatter paper everywhere.

Appearances: I’ll be at Sydney Kinkuniya bookstore on the 8th August, 2015 @ 4pm-5:30pm, for a panel called “Women and Comics: A Comic Con-versation”. This is going to be interesting…

Fabled Kingdom News: I’m now past the 50% mark! The story is meant to be 21 chapters, and I’m now halfway through Chapter 12. It’s remarkable how quickly things can move – I’m doing a chapter a month, and I hope to finish Chapter 14 by the end of October.

Which brings me to this: I now have Chapter 8-11 of book2 available for sale as PDFs on Smashwords. They’re books 4 and 5 in the series, and they’ll also be available on Apple iBooks (and also Nook and Kobo, though it’s best to download the sample to make sure that the file can work on those readers).

Again, I’ve had to mess with the chapter distribution. Previously, it was meant to be 9 ebooks with 2.5 chapters each, but thanks to the 10MB file size limit Smashwords imposes, it’s now 10 ebooks with 2 chapters each. Since it’s now 2 chapters each part instead of 2.5, I’ve lowered the price of each ebook to $1.69 and made book 4 free until the end of July. Sorry for the inconvenience, folks – hopefully this will be the last time this sort of thing happens.

Tumblr Posts: I’ve been posting animated gifts of my work up onto my tumblr. Check it out if you want to see more of these kinds of roughs-to-finished pics!

Comics-Prose Tutorial and Website Re-do: This is still happening, and in the works. However, I hope to at least get book 2 done first so I have some time to devote to finishing this… *sigh*

Hi all! Just dropping in to let you all know what’s happening with me lately. I’m currently in Hong Kong, and instead of taking a well-earned break, I’m OF COURSE doing work. I have a bunch of stuff I want to work on, which I’ll list here.

Fabled Kingdom News: Chapters 8-10(of21) is done, but I need to edit and proof-read it. I’ve finished writing Chapter 11, and I hope to get Chapter 12-14 at least started while I’m away from my drawing table. Anyway, book 2 should definitely be done by the end of 2015. Meanwhile, book 1(of3) is finished, containing Chapters 1-7 (212 pages), and out in print and ebook format. Head on over to my Store page to check it out.

Fabled Kingdom Art: I’ve started to post animated gifs of my colouring/toning process over on my Tumblr, so I might as well post some here on my blog too. More coming!

Updating my website: I’m reworking my website, and updating the way it looks. This will take a while, and a lot of bloopers, me thinks.

Geting my Comics-Prose Tutorial up: Halfway done! Need to step on it – it’s on at DeviantArt, due to the ease of asking questions and building a community there. Warning: I need to finish rest of the articles, so remember, it’s not yet done. After the tutorial is finished, I’ll probably look to do a self-publishing tutorial.

Also available on Kobo and Nook, but the older versions of these ereaders may have difficulty displaying the pages. Please read a sample first before buying.

More on the Printing Process

I didn’t expect so many problems with the printing, but in retrospect, I can see where the problems came in. I used Lulu and Amazon to do my printing, and both turned out very good once I got the settings right. The interiors are high quality black and white art, which are identical in both books. Below, I talk about what went wrong with both printers.

Lulu:

I’ve been printing with Lulu for years, and I messed this one up by accidently choosing the wrong paper settings. Lulu has changes its interface every now and then without telling you, and I accidently clicked the “white” paper setting for the 6″x9″ size without realising that there is NO good quality white paper setting for that size. The end result is that I got an inferior paper quality, which shocked me. In the end, I changed it to a cream colour page, which is high quality and is what differs the Lulu book from the Amazon book.

Amazon Createspace:

Oh boy. It’s my first time printing with Createspace, and it took a while to get right. I think CS has the best print quality out of all the printers out there, but the entire process is a black box. The best thing about CS is that human beings actually handle the printing process, but that’s also the biggest problem. The human handling your files can tweak your files without you knowing what they did, so the end results can mean that your colour cover could look different from one test print to the next. The good news is that once it’s been approved, the settings stay the same, so your next book will look EXACTLY as the previous one, right down to where they cut the paper (usually a few mm off… eh, can’t be helped. Lulu has the same problem).

Anyway, the mistake I made is a very important one. I can sum it up as: NEVER SUBMIT GREYSCALE FILES TO CREATESPACE. It seems that if you submit 600 dpi greyscale files to CS, they will automatically downgrade it to 300 dpi without telling you. In the end, I got around this problem by turning my greyscale files into black-and-white dot art through the photoshop “halftone” function. At least no one can do anything to black and white files, so that’s why the Lulu and Amazon books look identical in its print results.

The other good thing about CS is its Kindle Matchbook Program. Right now, if you buy a print copy of book 1, you can get the ebook version for 99 cents. An excellent thing.